Transcriptions

If you want to include
transcriptions, including transcribed extracts, in your data then ideally they
should appear in the Resource entity that describes the associated digital or
physical artefact; they should not appear in any Citation entity that
references the data source. Although the transcription could appear in a
top-level Narrative entity, this is not recommended since it disassociates it
from any digital image of the text and other descriptive information about it.

When the Source entity is used for
source analysis, it designed to work with transcriptions identified by <ResourceLnk>
elements. In principle, the Source entity could work directly from an image — especially if it contained a transcription
within its meta-data, possibly linked to the image using SVG — but there are
currently no examples for this. The x/y attributes available on selected
elements at Descriptive Mark-up may be used to keep
transcriptions and document scans in step when displaying them to the end-user.

For a multi-page source then there
may be separate Resource entities but these can be grouped using STEMMA’s
inheritance mechanism. See Hierarchical
Sources. The Source entity’s <SourceLet> elements also accept an
abbreviated Parameter list in their own <ResourceLnk> elements (sharing
the remainder with the main <Frame> element) in order to make it
convenient to cite individual parts of a source.

In summary, the transcription
would appear in a <Text> element within the Resource entity, and it would
use the mark-up described under Narrative Structure to capture original presentational attributes, anomalies such as
marginalia and corrections, and the semantics of subject references, dates,
etc. Some of the semantic mark-up takes a DetLnk=’key’ attribute that allows
that field to be labelled for analysis and correlation within the Source and
Matrix entities. The Resource entity can even indicate that you have the
physical original as well as an image of it. See Handling
Transcriptions, and also Structured
Narrative for a worked example.